An Occupy Obituary

Don’t s#!+ where you eat. That basic workplace rule takes on a more literal meaning in the Occupy camps. People defecate where they dine. This isn’t a cheap shot. It’s reality. From Seattle to New York to Oakland to Washington, DC, the pooparazzi’s cameras have captured occupation defecations.

This isn’t just bad PR. It’s bad hygiene. Those obsessed with the environment stand strangely aloof from their pollution of their own surroundings. Self-righteousness and self-awareness aren’t usually a package deal.

Do you recall the public defecations during 1963’s March on Washington? The rapes at last year’s Tea Party rallies? The narcotics busts plaguing the annual March for Life?

No? Me neither. It’s only Occupy Wall Street and its imitators that bequeath this disgraceful, and disgusting, legacy.

The group’s behavior rebuts its demands. For a little faction to tell a big country how it should rearrange itself, that group should be able to order its house, at least minimally, in a responsible way. This mob’s words lack weight, and their narcissistic stench can’t make up for it.

If Occupy Wall Street were a restaurant, the board of health would board up its entrances. If Occupy Wall Street were a hotel (or even a housing project), building inspectors would shut it down. If “occupier” were an occupation, unions would protest their inhumane working conditions.

Of course, the Occupy camps are all these things. People eat, sleep, and work in them. But their inhabitants, who seek a more activist government, want immunity from Big Brother’s rules and wrath. Regulation for thee, not for me. They practice lawlessness as they preach intervention. Though jealous of their own rights, they trample on the rights of others—and preach for the government to trample more.

Occupiers live like animals in their filth. But they behave like people in their hypocrisy.

To occupy implies force. But the occupiers insist that theirs is a non-violent protest. A peaceful seizure is an oxymoron. The protestors commit violence against both property rights and language. Whether the impromptu camping grounds belong by right to the public or to private persons, they don’t belong to the people in the tents.

If you occupy that spare couch that the guy in a tent previously crashed on, then the incursion would be clear to him. But the protestors are flatfooted simpletons ethically, and selfish; they cannot put the shoe on the other foot. They don’t grasp why it’s immoral when they take what isn’t theirs.

The occupiers’ land expropriations advertise their program: theft. So, too, does the inherently parasitical display of able-bodied people engaged in non-productive activity. Who can afford to hang out for months in a park? A person sponging—off the government, off parents, off charity.

At every turn, what they do speaks against what they say. The dependency they exhibit is the dependency they call for. An America taken over by the principles of the Occupy movement would very much resemble an Occupy camp: a dirty, smelly place where lazy people subside off the backs of others.

Cities fed-up with playing babysitter to the adult babies in the camps have begun evicting their tenting tenants.

Chicago is unoccupied. So is Los Angeles. Philadelphia and Portland, too. In Boston, where Occupy-related police overtime approaches $1 million, the Rose Kennedy Greenway has become the Rose Kennedy Brownway. Boston’s Finest removed the urban squatters Saturday morning. A muddy mess littered with trash and political graffiti remains.

There is a name for people who issue demands, lean on others to provide for them, and make messes for others to clean up. They’re called children, and for good reason we don’t allow them a vote. For these same reasons, it would be unwise to let Occupy’s adult children influence the votes of citizens or legislators.

The Occupy obituary should note that the movement displaced the homeless, drained city budgets, left a lingering stink, and destroyed public parks. It didn’t change a single law—or, one might venture, a single mind—in its favor.

Occupy a bathtub. Occupy a barber’s chair. Occupy a job. And do it in that order.